Prayer

An excerpt from John Goldingay's book 'To the Usual Suspects' based on Moses prayer to God

...five amazing things you can tell God not to do:

• Don't lose your temper
• Don't give up with the job half done
• Don't give people the excuse to misjudge you
• Don't be inflexible
• Don't forget your promises

Strange isn't it?

A prayer

Lord,

words always seem to be the last resort
but I long, deeply long
for grace to permeate the meeting
of two people so different
yet so saved.
May the wisdom that
called men to follow her
make herself known.
May patience the hardest fruit
ripen to juiciness
May calmness with a wave
of your hand, settle
May your love be allowed
to flow through their
rusty selves.
And if all goes wrong Lord
we know that you feel
the pain, the loss
and that you will work it out
some other way.
But I do hope what happens
would be the good thing.
Thank you that you indulge in
silly prayers. Amen.

Marked

A bit blown away by this

http://www.markedgraphicnovel.com/home.html

The Talkers

Look at him.
Yes him.
It's very rarely her.
He talks and talks
and talks and talks.
The people listen and sleep.
They listen and fume.
They listen and read.
They listen and get blessed.

It's the centre.
It's never missed
rarely shortened
and quite often
the wrong wind.

It's based on a library
one that I love
that I get lost in
that I find hard.

And yet this talk
often makes me despair
for I do love the talkers
even though funny voices
squeak and boom from them.

This is bovine gold
for the new nomads
helped across with
wireless but receivers
that are tiring.

the bards realised
their own folly
and sang of it
but when will
the Talkers?

Imagine or Die

Thoughts from Brueggemann's Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile pgs - 23-25

1. Poets have no advice to give people. They only want people to see differently, to re-vision life. They are not coercive. They only try to stimulate, surprise, hint and give nuance, not more. They cannot do more, because they are making a world that does not yet exist beyond their imagination; but their offer of this imaginative world is necessary to give freedom of action. The poets want us to re-experience the present world under a different set of metaphors, and they want us to entertain an alternative world not yet visible...

2. Poets speak porously. They use the kind of language that is not exhausted at first hearing. They leave many things open, ambiguous still to be discerned after more reflection. They do not pretend to know the future, but they offer the present as a shockingly open and ambiguous matter out of which various futures may yet emerge. They do not need to see the end of their words or all the implications before they speak....

3. The purpose of porous language is to leave the poem and the reality to which it points open for the experience of the listener. Poets do indeed trust other people to continue the image, to finish the thought out of their own experience. But that requires the kind of rich metaphorical language that is open and polyvalent. Very often people who hear poets want an explanation, which means to slot the words into categories already predetermined and controlled. Such an act, however, is the death of the poem....

pg 26-27

In our day many in ministry are caught in bitter exhaustion because people seem so resistant. That resistance, I submit, comes from a frightened, crushed imagination that has been robbed of power precisely because of fear. Indeed, one can note the abysmal lack of imagination in the formation of policy about either internation security or domestic economics. We can think of nothing to do except to do more of the same, which generates only more problems and more fear. When we are frightened, we want certitude, not porousness. So the voices of religious certitude and the advocates of political domination seem persuasive....

The practice of such poetic discourse is very difficult. It is difficult because it takes more energy than our conventional prose which is predictable and accepted on all sides. It is difficult, secondly, because it will be very much misunderstood. We are not accustomed to such communication. But the risk must be taken. Jesus' parables stand as witness that the kingdom comes by imagination, by poetic discourse. Such a way of speech creates vitality in ministry, because it keeps possibility open in the life of the community. Where there is not speech which keeps possibility open, we are left only with necessity. That is what the rulers of this age may want. But that ends in death.

The strange sum of things

We often think that when we have completed our study of 'one', we know all about 'two', because 'two is one and one'. We forget that we still have to make a study of 'and'. - Eddington

Death

Why do we die?

A virus.

Some cry, some sigh

some shrug and say ah well.

She made good cakes didn't she?

We should cry.

Death is horrible.

Asking why allows a basic truth through.

Death is unnatural.

A man on a cross said, 'Remember me...'

The other said 'Today you'll be with me'

Ey? What does that mean?